French Renaissance songs are very fond of farewells, and these two examples- Josquin's Mille Regretz and Dufay's Adieu, ces bons vins- execute their theme particularly elegantly. The lyrics on their own are of modest quality, but somehow, with the skill of those long, haunting, angular chords, they are elevated to exquisitely memorable laments. The songwriters' skill can be further inflated by misinterpreting the Dufay, and the first half of the Josquin, as the words of a dying, not departing, person.
French | English (my translation) |
Mille regretz de vous abandonner Et d'eslonger vostre fache amoureuse, Jay si grand dueil et paine douloureuse, Quon me verra brief mes jours definer. | A thousand regrets to leave you, And to move away from your loving face. Such is my pain and sorrow That my days will soon draw to a close. |
Adieu ces bons vins de Lannoys. Adieu dames, adieu bourgeois, Adieu celle que tant amoye, Adieu toute playssante joye, Adieu tout compagnons gallois. | Goodbye, sweet wines of Lannoys, Goodbye, ladies, goodbye, townsmen, Goodbye to her I so loved, Goodbye, all pleasant joy, Goodbye, all coarser companions. |
The quotability of these lines- I can imagine singing them in a sad, quiet spot in the countryside- got me thinking about the strange power of borrowed words to enhance, and even fabricate, our emotions by giving them form, a subject on which Wilde (the greatest art critic of his century) had much to say:
'Do you wish to love? Use Love's Litany, and the words will create the yearning from which the world fancies that they spring. Have you a grief that corrodes your heart? Steep yourself in the Language of grief, learn its utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance, and you will find that mere expression is a mode of consolation, and that Form, which is the birth of passion, is also the death of pain.'
The above passage, while shrewdly accurate, is a bit awkwardly phrased to my taste. Wilde expresses himself better in a favourite passage of mine, in which he combines this idea of quoting for aesthetic effect, with a defence of those who interpreted art in ways unintended by the artist:
'Who, again, cares whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of Mona Lisa something that Leonardo never dreamed of? The painter may have been merely the slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before that strange figure ‘set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea,’ I murmur to myself, ‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas [...]'
'
A gloriously Romantic exaltation. It always makes me smile, because it reminds me of how Ayn Rand railed against those who lived through other's words and emotions- she considered it a borrowed life. Yet Wilde understood the beauty of what Rand's stubbornly rational mind had failed to grasp.
Speaking of aesthetic over reason, I was reading a book about Japanese poetry by Stephen Addiss, I came across the following lines, referring to the 9th-century poet Ono no Komachi:
'By the eleventh century, legends had grown around her name, such as when she required a suitor to stand outside her house for one hundred nights, whatever the weather. On the ninety-ninth evening, he died.'
-Stephen Addiss, The Art of Haiku: Its History Through Poems and Paintings by Japanese Masters (p23)
I paused, because this seemed familiar, and then it hit me. Cinema Paradiso.
For those who have not watched the movie (do!), the lovestruck protagonist hears a tale from his mentor. It has a much nicer ring in the Italian, but here's the English too:
English (my translation)
Italian
The young protagonist is horrified and baffled at the end. 'But why? At the end?' 'Yes, right at the end,' answers the other. 'And don't ask me for the meaning; I don't know. If you can understand it, you tell me.'
Eventually, after much heartbreak, the protagonist thinks he has understood:
English (my translation)
Italian
A foolish, pointless story? Perhaps. But beautiful nevertheless.
We can remember that stunning line from Antonino Massimo Rugolo (often mistakenly attributed to Pirandello): E l'amore guardò il tempo e rise. 'And love looked at time, and laughed.'
Or Ben Jonson,
'‘Let it not your wonder move,
Less your laughter, that I love.’'
I wondered if the writers of Cinema Paradiso had taken inspiration from Japanese tales, but Google was most unhelpful on this front.
I noticed a tangential similarity this week between two haikus on nature and the subversion of social hierarchies.
First, this. A “daimio” is a lord:
‘Lo! the cherry-blossoms have forced
A daimio to dismount.’
-Issa, tr. Asatarō Miyamori
then this:
‘Behold! violets bloom within
The fence of the forbidden ground.’
-Shida Yaba, tr. Asatarō Miyamori
Issa’s haiku also reminds me of a verse from DH Lawrence's Spring Morning:
'Ah, through the open door
Is there an almond-tree
Aflame with blossom!
-Let us fight no more.'
Lawrence seems, judging by an anthology of his work I've been reading, to be very fond of almond-trees. A particularly breathtaking example is Almond Blossom, in which the natural world is used to give us various kinds of hope. He starts with the titular tree as a symbol of hope in darkly mechanical times:
'This is the iron age,
But let us take heart
Seeing iron break and bud,
Seeing rusty iron puff with clouds of blossom.
[...]
The almond tree
That knows the deadliest poison [...]'
Then he cites the tree as an 'exiled' wanderer (not native to the region he encountered it in) who yet prospers:
'The alien trees in alien lands: and yet
The heart of blossom,
The unquenchable heart of blossom!'
(another fragment I think haiku masters would greatly approve of)
It is:
'Iron, but unforgotten.
Iron, dawn-hearted,
Ever-beating dawn-heart, enveloped in iron against the exile, against the ages.'
Note the beautiful Hopkinsesque compound adjectives.
It's not just this tree, though; he cites the perseverance of the fig-tree and, especially nicely, the vine: (again, those compounds! And I appreciate the use of the rare 'cicatrised'):
'Look at the many-cicatrised frail vine, none more scarred
and frail,
Yet see him fling himself in fresh abandon
From the small wound-stump.'
But to be honest, these moral lessons are a very small part of the experience of this poem, and Lawrence's poetry in general. The point is those glorious, thrumming, colours and breathless flow of Lawrence's poetic voice, the zingy life, which means the work never feels didactic even when it arguably is. Read the whole thing through, in a single breath.
Back to haikus- while they're both excellent, the haiku of the week must go to this, by Chigetsu. It remains one of my favourites by far. The theme is similar to that of Issa's above haiku, but stripped of social commentary, leaving just this wonderful blend of domesticity and magic:
‘Bush warbler: I rest my hands in the kitchen sink.’
-tr. Hiroaki Sato
Reading Mirza Ghalib's poetry as translated by Michael R. Burch, I came across this:
'All your life, O Ghalib, you repeated the same mistake:
your face was dirty but you kept obsessively cleaning the mirror!'
which reminded me of quite possibly my favourite Wilde epigram, representing the writer at his height of genius:
'The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.'
and also, more tangentially, of this pearl from Socrates as reported by Montaigne:
English (my translation) | French |
Socrates was told of a man who was no better for his travels: -'I can well believe it,' he said, 'he took himself with him.' | On disait à Socrate que quelqu’un ne s’était aucunement amendé en son voyage : — Je le crois bien, dit-il ; il s’était emporté avec soi. |
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